Add your note files to Vim help
Many people have lots of files containing short notes regarding your computer, your work, and so on. When you have years of notes, it can be hard to find what you need. One solution is to vim-helpify your note files, and add a link to them from the ~/.vim/doc/ directory. Here is an extract from a notes file showing the process: " vim: filetype=help foldmethod=marker foldmarker=<<<,>>> modifiable noreadonly You need the noreadonly and modifiable keywords in the vim modeline above. Help files are by default regarded as readonly and nomodifiable files by vim. Notes about sed *sed* *sfsed* <<< Swapping word's in stream (I know, you don't need the cat) cat Myfile.h|sed 's/foo/fyy/g' Notes about vim *vim* *sfvim* <<< Stuff I have learned about vim. Create a help link like this |add-local-help| Regenerate help tags: |helptags| A realy big section closed with a tag <<< --- lots of stuf --- Closing tag >>> Telephonelist *sfphone* <<< mom: 555-676767-333 dad: 555-767676-222 sis: 555-121212-999 As you can see from my sample I tend to prepend my keywords with sf so I can get a handy list with later. I have tried to index files placed in an arbitrary place. Sadly enough the helptags command does not seem to like this, so my solution has been to make a soft link from the ~/.vim/doc/ directory to my file. You can do this from vim: :!ln -s ~/.vim/doc/mynotes.txt ~/Documents/mynotesfile.myext To have vim create the tags :helptags ~/.vim/doc Now when I need that important phone numer it's only one :h command away :h sfp You could also create your own helptags function adding tags containing a more specifig file position. A realy simple function would be. function! AddMyHelpTags() exe 'echo -e "sfsed\t ~/Documents/mynotesfile.mytext\t/\*sfsed\*" >> ~/.vim/doc/tags' exe 'echo -e "sfphone\t ~/Documents/mynotesfile.mytext\t/\*sfphone\*" >> ~/.vim/doc/tags' exe 'sort ~/.vim/doc/tags > /tmp/foo.vim.tags' exe 'mv -f /tmp/foo.vim.tags ~/.vim/doc/tags' endfunction I do not use such a AddMyHelpTags function myself. But I have tested the principle (The sample function it self is not tested, only the commands). This is just a sample to get you going. Remember that you probably would have to run this AddMyHelpTags function each time :helptags has been called, so as-is it is not very convenient. Comments If you are not able to create the symlink in the vim/doc file, you can do the following: 1. :set helpfile to a file help.txt in a directory of your choice. The file can be empty. 2. :set runtimepath+= 3. :helptags Then the helptags of all *.txt files in the new directory are additional available. For me, this works with gvim6.3 but not with gvim6.1. ---- I dropped foldmarker=<<<,>>> from modeline and use default }. What is the benefit of using <<< and >>>, except for the possibility to interfere with some C code that uses signed shift? ---- I needed to enable modelines (my default was nomodeline) :set modeline If you want autogenerate tags after writing files, add this line into your .vimrc : autocmd BufWritePost ~/.vim/doc/* :helptags ~/.vim/doc Anybody knows how to edit your own help files, when they are invoke by: :h yourtag For me, I need to ":set ma" all the time, not so handy